The Curse of the Pixar Universe

“Inside Out”: five characters live inside the mind of an eleven-year-old and take control of her actions.

Walt Disney Co. / Everett

Since the subject of the new Pixar film, “Inside Out”—directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Ronaldo Del Carmen—is life lived in the grip of emotions, let me admit to mine: I emerged from the theatre feeling like W. C. Fields, hating children, all children, even my children, because of what those who purport to make movies for them have been doing, both to movies and to children. Part of the reason for this contained fury is the fact that I couldn’t ascribe that feeling to any of the five backroom toilers who figure in the movie itself—Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), or Disgust (Mindy Kaling). They are five characters who live inside the mind of the eleven-year-old Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) and take control of her actions.

For all the cleverness of “Inside Out,” I was jolted from the start by its deformation of children and of mental life. I saw a feature-length sales pitch—or, worse, an indoctrination—to mold kids into beings as artificial and uniform as those created, by computer graphics, in the movie. The film is on the wrong track from the beginning, when the first view of the world, through the eyes of the infant Riley, is taken by Joy, and Joy becomes, from that point on, the default leader, Riley’s emotional captain.

Given the smack on the bottom that brings Riley and all of us into the world, and the lusty howl that follows, I’d say that something altogether different is in the driver’s seat. Anyone who hears a baby scream at the slightest quiver of need or discomfort knows better than Pixar that primal forces, entirely more hirsute and imperious, are in control from the start, and those forces only slowly and grudgingly make room for the five cutesy minions of emotional negotiation. When a baby cries with hunger, it’s not from joy or sadness, and describing that feeling as a blend of fear and anger gets the palette wrong, makes it too negative. It’s the drive to survive, the will to exist, the life force—the principle of action itself.

Something else is packed alongside that will to exist, alongside the craving for self-assertion and gratification, which is as much physical as ethical: the sheer pleasure of active negation, of “No! in thunder,” of the Big Fuck You—or even just a little mockery or insolence—for no particular reason at all, beside the fact that doing dumb or nasty things is sometimes the only way to feel alive. It’s the feeling when, afterward, one says, “The devil made me do it”; in Pixar’s world, there’s no sympathy for the devil.

In lieu of the mysteries and wonders of life, instead of big dreams and big fears, in place of the cosmic sense of childhood infinity that Terrence Malick thrillingly got at in “The Tree of Life” (the best movie about a child’s inner life that I’ve ever seen), “Inside Out” offers problems to be solved, a narrow range of a narrow life of narrow prospects and narrow experiences, narrow fantasies and narrow desires confined within the margins of a trivialized notion of what Riley’s imagination might entail.

The story concerns the eleven-year-old’s move, with her parents, from Minnesota to San Francisco, when her father changes jobs. (His new venture is a startup, for which he spends time soothing skittish investors.) The transition—to a new home, a new school, and new surroundings—involves letting go of the old while trying to maintain a sense of self in changed circumstances. That sense of self is rooted in the inner landscape, among Riley’s so-called islands of identity, defining traits that include family, hockey, and honesty. I don’t believe it. Furtiveness and deception are at least as much at the core of life and the essence of character—and not just Riley’s character but human character. The filmmakers plant honesty deep in Riley’s being for the usual Hollywood reasons of creating role models, virtues to emulate, positive images. But the effect is to distort Riley and misrepresent the way we form social relationships: through performances and masks that one tries on, as much for oneself as for others.

Similarly, the “family” of Riley’s island should be much more than the warmth of her parents’ embrace, or even the slight apprehension of her father’s uneasy business calls that she doesn’t understand. There should be resentment, jealousy, emulation, curiosity, fascination, and a wider web of connections—history, tradition, lore, anecdotes, all sorts of indirect experience that looms as large in selfhood as do domestic routines and comforts. The wonder of childhood is the opposite of the cozy vision of “Inside Out”—the sense of bigness, of a vast world remaining to be discovered. A world that offers surprises and secrets at virtually every turn, that launches flights of fancy during all activities, whether ordinary or dramatic.

Even as Docter and Del Carmen trick out the child’s inner life with a tiny range of foregrounded issues, they realize this sentimental vision with intricate computer animation and an elaborate, constantly expanding view of the mind as a complex inner landscape. The movie flips perspectives throughout, between life as it appears to Riley, at the macroscopic level of ordinary behavior, and the inner life of her five emotions and the other beings that they (especially Joy and Sadness) encounter as they try to guide Riley through her life. The filmmakers adorn the movie with clever renderings and parallels of the inner life (or at least the aspects of the inner life that they choose to include). The best of these representations displays memories as iridescent, luminous oversized marbles—handled by the five emotions as if they were bowling balls, but clinking against each other with a hollow metallic ring.

Riley’s inner life is thinly populated, and missing some big characters, such as the Skeptic, or the Bullshit Detector (children have sharp ones), the Creator, and even the Thinker (reason itself is a sort of passion or emotion). Meanwhile, Riley’s outer life is virtually culture-free (her one musical connection, an earworm that gets a droll behind-the-scenes representation within her mind, is a song from a gum commercial). The one thing that Disney and Pixar can’t represent is themselves—their own control over the inner being, over the self-representation of a child—yet it’s the movie’s main subject. In effect, “Inside Out” is a feature-length training manual for seeing life like a Pixar movie, an imprint machine for creating its own consumers.

The very notion of what’s appropriate for children looms over any consideration of a movie intended for children. It’s unfair to expect a cheerful animated comedy to approximate Malick’s cosmogonic exhilarations, but for a director of genius there are ways. One of them involves comic anarchy, and there, too, “Inside Out” shows its tight limits. One of Riley’s “islands of identity” is called “goofball,” the antic side of her character, but Docter and Del Carmen endow her with only a mild, trivial, and highly moralistic sense of whimsy. If the goofball side of the movie is as wacky as Riley gets, she’s ready for a role in “Ida.”

The character’s lack of humor is matched by the movie’s own. The dull one-liners and conspicuous C.G.I. camera-mugging seem calculated by the filmmakers to keep the tone and the import of “Inside Out” from spilling over the boundaries of their carefully devised meaning and clearly delineated messages. The worst thing in children’s films—and the curse of the Pixar universe—is insipid virtue.